Friday afternoon tidbits

Seeing a couple of movies this weekend: The Hurt Locker and Harry Potter. Which will be better? I can't even begin to guess.

-Kyle Orland imagines what life would be like if game characters used Twitter. Pretty funny, and an excellent opportunity to link to my own game-related Tweets.

-Also on Crispy Gamer, Scott Jones envisions a world in which great authors reviewed video games. The Hemingway excerpt almost made me choke.

-While I was on vacation, Clint Hocking responded to the Far Cry 2 perma-death phenomenon that's sweeping at least two blogs. He's a hell of a sharp guy, and argues forcefully once again that it's the elements of gameplay themselves that create meaning, and not a designer-imposed narrative.

-Ryan Stewart's review of Guitar Hero: Smash Hits is worth reading on its own, but he does himself one better with a visual summary. His Guitar Hero Venn diagram neatly categories each song according to whether it is fun, good, hard, or any combination of the three. And, yes, "Back in the Saddle" is terrible.

-This one's been making its way around the intertubes, but in case you messed it: Jeff Atwood explores the devolution of the ads for Civony and Evony, from the initial generic Lord of the Rings rip to -- well, see for yourself.

-The sports blog Deadspin took a page from their Gawker media compadres Kotaku and posted "If They Were Athletes: The Robots from Mega Man 2." Curt Schilling as Air Man is too perfect.

Let the weekend start... now!

Man and Megaman

Above: There are places I remember / All my life, though some have changed / Some forever, not for better

I've been playing Mega Man 9, and enjoying it -- mostly. But there's an unintended consequence of my playing this game: It's causing me to re-evaluate my relationship with Mega Man 2.

Along with Contra, Mega Man 2 is my favorite NES game. Both are considered among the most difficult 8-bit games, but I can beat each one without breaking a sweat. That's not thanks to any particular skill on my part. It's because I played these games until I knew every screen by heart. Playing them isn't a matter of reacting to what's happening onscreen. It's all muscle memory. I know every move my enemies make before they make it. I know what hazards will appear onscreen at each moment. I can leap with confidence to platforms that haven't even appeared yet. I can fire at the exact location my offscreen foes will be seconds from now.

I can tell you everything you need to know about Mega Man 2 more easily than I can remember my family members' birthdays. Beat Metal Man first, then use the Metal Blade to defeat Flash Man, Bubble Man, and Wood Man. The Wood Shield takes down Air Man, whose Air Shooter makes short work of Crash Man (hang onto those Crash Missiles; you'll need them in Dr. Wily's Castle). Use Flash Stop against Quick Man and Bubble Lead against Heat Man.

In Dr. Wily's castle, the Quick Boomerangs will dispatch both the flying dragon and the Gutsdozer with ease. Use Metal Blades to knock off the second stage boss, and Crash Missiles against the fourth stage boss (hot tip: to avoid getting hit by the converging fire from the latter boss, pause and un-pause the game as quickly as you can until the rounds have passed through you). To destroy Dr. Wily's ship, first use a charged Atomic Fire to blast away the hull, and then go at the cockpit with Metal Blades. To defeat the final boss, Bubble Lead is your way to go.

And, of course, if you want to skip straight to Dr. Wily's castle at start-up, the code is A1 B2 B4 C1 C5 D1 D3 E3 E5.

I say all this not because you need to know it -- you probably knew it already -- but to demonstrate how reflexive one's knowledge of an NES game had to be. For me, that was partly a result of simply playing the same games over and over for weeks or months at a time. But it's also what was required to beat these games. You had to know them inside out. They were littered with traps that would be unavoidable unless you already knew they were coming. Unless you could traverse the levels with your eyes closed, you couldn't do it at all. With minimal extra lives, and a frequent "game over" screen, getting through a Mega Man game was a matter of attrition.

This is still the case with Mega Man 9.

As others have noted, and as I will note in my review, Mega Man 9 is a perfect emulation of a Nintendo game. From the graphics, to the sound, to the level design, you could have told me this game was originally released in 1988 and I'd believe you. That's the argument in the game's favor. It's also a stark reminder of how games have changed since then -- for the better, I'd argue.

There is a feeling of accomplishment in getting through a tough game, sure. And the platforming challenges and boss battles I've encountered so far in Mega Man 9 aren't all that difficult from a purely mechanical standpoint. They just require a little planning and practice. (An early example: In Splash Woman's stage, you drop from one screen to the next. If you are not already pressing left or right on the d-pad when the screen scrolls, you will not have enough time to avoid hitting insta-kill spikes.) But this method of level design feels cheap to my 2008 self. Why shouldn't I be able to hang back and regroup? I've seen the "game over" screen more after three levels of Mega Man 9 than I did in the entirety of BioShock.

Still, my enjoyment of Mega Man 9 increased when I decided to hit up GameFaqs for the optimal stage order. For a minute I felt like I was cheating somehow, but then I realized: I never figured anything out in Mega Man 2 on my own. Not a thing. Not only was I told which weapon to use on what boss, I even watched my friend Ryan go through all the levels before I ever completed any of them myself.

There's the basic truth of this: In all my warm and fuzzy memories of Mega Man 2, I cannot remember a time when I didn't know all there was to know about it. That level of mastery colors my perception of the game, as it has for the past 20 years.

Now? I may be able to look up strategies to help me get through Mega Man 9, but after that I'll be done with it. This has to do with how games have changed, and how I've changed as a player. What this game has done is convince me that if I played Mega Man 2 for the first time today, I wouldn't like it very much. I can't imagine anything sadder.

Get by with a little help from my friends

Lucas Arts adventure games hold a special place in my heart, as you can tell from the name of this blog. So I've been following the Vintage Game Club's discussion of Grim Fandango with some interest, even though I'm not participating and, in fact, never played the game.

Much of the discussion so far has centered on the difficulty of the game's puzzles. One of the hallmarks of the Lucas Arts games was the twisted logic of the inventory based puzzles, which often became clear only in retrospect. Consider the scene in The Secret of Monkey Island in which Guybrush is tethered to an idol and thrown off a pier. Dozens of sharp objects surround him, all just a little bit further than he can reach. He is unable to cut the the anchor keeping him on the sea floor.

The solution? Pocket the statue, and walk away. It is the last thing you would think of, and yet within the game world it makes perfect sense. Moreover, because it is the only object in the scene that Guybrush can interact with, no other solution is even conceivable.

Most of the puzzles make more sense than that. But they all require a degree of lateral thinking that action games don't match. My favorite Lucas Arts puzzles are completely straightforward, but it's hard to analyze your way through them. More often, the solution springs from that elusive "Eureka moment," when your brain suddenly connects two pieces of information in a totally new way.

But I've got to be honest: I didn't make my way through these games by myself. In fact, I didn't even own them. I played through The Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max Hit the Road, and Full Throttle all at my friend Justin's house. He walked me through them almost every step of the way, giving me hints where appropriate and solutions where necessary. I did as much as I could on my own, but given the choice between agonizing over some esoteric puzzle, or moving ahead with the storyline, I chose the easier option every time. I don't know if that helped me enjoy these games more, or less. But how could I possibly have liked them more?

Puzzle games weren't the only genre in which I needed a boost. Another friend of mine in elementary school, Ryan, was a gaming savant. There was no single-player game he couldn't rip through, and no multiplayer game in which any of us could compete with him. He entered the Nintendo World Championships and did all right for himself, advancing beyond the state level, if I recall correctly. He was sponsored by Child World, the toy store, and the Framingham location had his picture on their wall. Most of what I learned about playing video games, I learned from him. He was GameFAQs before there was GameFAQs.

Ryan couldn't help me play action games the way Justin helped me play puzzle games, but I improved just by watching him. I never would have figured out on my own to use the Wood Shield against Air Man, the the Air Blades against Crash Man, or the metal blades against Metal Man -- to say nothing of navigating the tricks and traps of Dr. Wiley's castle. To this day, Mega Man 2 is the only game in the series I can beat, because it's the only one I was able to watch Ryan play. My list of vanquished NES games is brief, but I think Ryan deserves credit for just about all of them.

I know lots of people who consider using walkthroughs to be cheating, and whose enjoyment of video game derives from overcoming challenges. But frankly, I think the help I got from my friends is part of the reason I came to love games in the first place. These days I'm much more apt to bail on a game that's giving me too much trouble, because, after all, there are so many other games out there. People remember Contra as being brutally difficult, but even today I can still power through it without even using The Code, and only because I got the guidance I needed from a friend. I cannot say the same about any game released in the last, oh, 15 years or so.

It's hard to remember that some of these older games were ever that difficult, if we can recall them only through the prism of victory. Which brings us back to Grim Fandango. The quirky nature of the puzzles is confounding several of the folks participating in the Vintage Game Club. And it seems to be keeping some of them from fully surrendering themselves to the world that Schafer and company created. What's the better outcome: letting the game defeat you, or getting by with a little help from your friends?

This post is an entry in the July '08 Round Table. To read more entries, use the dropdown below.

Note: After writing -- and titling -- this entry, I saw that another Round Table bloggist had covered much the same ground. It was a coincidence, I swear!